Sunday, April 09, 2017
Not elegant but grabbed my attention
Looking briefly at the ShadowBrokers stuff. Hall of mirrors for sure. The notice from the hackers is OBVIOUS fake Russian, like Boris and Natasha. Real Russians who know some English don't sound like that. Real Russians have trouble with articles but don't say 'is being' and 'is having'.
Are the hackers parodying NSA's use of fake Russian, or are the hackers actually NSA? Given the detail in the actual dump, I'm more inclined toward the former, but have to remain cautious.
Most of the contents are config files for hacking. Some of the binaries may be actual 'engines' but I'm not going to download those. The config files list the fake sources for a specific schedule of hacks, and each of the fake sources contains a URL. Straightforward stuff, not as elegant as the CIA's Grasshopper with its language-like meta-language.
The main headings for the configuration groups caught my attention SHARPLY. As mentioned before, the first time I noticed the NSA's shadow was in the '80s when I was working on speech processing, and caught indications that NSA was way ahead of our academic work. We were working specifically on impairments of pitch and intonation.
Here's a screencap of the subject groups as seen through Wikileaks:
And the contents of one randomly chosen config file:
As far as I can tell, there's nothing directly related to speech processing in this dump. NSA was just using 'intonation' and 'pitches' to label two levels of configuration for their fake 'accents'. Their real work on speech was obviously aimed at monitoring phone conversations, which they mastered a long time ago.
¶ 2:32 AM 
And the contents of one randomly chosen config file:
As far as I can tell, there's nothing directly related to speech processing in this dump. NSA was just using 'intonation' and 'pitches' to label two levels of configuration for their fake 'accents'. Their real work on speech was obviously aimed at monitoring phone conversations, which they mastered a long time ago.
¶ 2:32 AM
